NaNo Update–I’m roughly 4,000 words behind.  You know, it’s bad enough when I hit lulls in my work that I have to trudge through.  It’s even worse when I’m on a word and time deadline.  So I’m hoping I can crank out about 7,000 words over the rest of the weekend so I can at least somewhat catch up.  I’m thanking the Thanksgiving god that I only have a two and a half day work week this week.  But it does make me feel a little better that out of the people on my buddy list on NaNo, I still have the highest word count.  That’s not going to write anything for me but at least I’m not alone.

I’d say maybe this time last year, I would have considered myself pretty ageist.  I don’t know where the thought came from but for whatever reason, I felt that because I was older, I knew more than the teenagers still in high school.  Stupid, I know, but I thought it.  What could they possibly know that I don’t?  I’m older.  I’ve experienced more.  I’ve traveled more.  I’m more worldly and wiser.  Little peons.

Thankfully I’ve grown and humbled.  I came to realize that I didn’t give them enough credit.  Not nearly enough.  When it comes to writing, there are kids still high school school that are further along in their careers than I am now.  There are kids that know as much as I do about the publishing world, if not more.  Hell, what I’ve learned I’ve just acquired within the past year.  Then again my focus has been scattered for many years prior to that.

My point it, if you can smell the asses of birds, it’s time to give your neck a rest.  No, teens don’t know everything.  But neither do I.  I’ve learned a lot about writing YA straight from teens, teens that are in the same writing position as me and teens that are in positions I hope to be in some day.  Am I jealous?  I won’t lie.  A little bit but I don’t have time to dwell because I have my own work to do.  So I hope nothing but good comes of their work and their careers and set back to work getting mine to that place.  A year ago I probably would have thought ‘what they hell did they do that I didn’t?’  Instead now I think ‘good for them.’  Then again, it helps to spin what you can into a positive.  I’m only human, after all.  It doesn’t always work but wishing ill on someone, or harping on their success, will get you nowhere but even more steps back.

It’s when I see comments from high school students like Agent Kristin’s intern about the publishing industry that make me realize how wrong I was before.  What she knows now, at sixteen or seventeen or eighteen, I just found out at twenty-four and twenty-five.  Pieces of it anyway.  Maybe I’d be closer to my goal if I had known that information at that age and if I’d been as steadfast about achieving it then as I am now.

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